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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Writer In Progress 2: It's the Structure, Stupid!

By Derek Adnams

When last we saw our intrepid Writer in Progress, I was
writing the story that would become a full blown comic book script. Well, I may
have misspoken. When I say “story,”
what I mean is a brainstorm of the events that will take place in the arc, put
into chronological order, with whatever pieces of dialogue, particular scenes
and motifs that are germane to the tale. It certainly is not a full blown short
story, ready for submission to a literary journal. The “story,” as I see it, is the basic material I’ll use for the
eventual script. But it’s always missing something, and that something is structure.

I must confess – I am
a structure junkie.I always
felt my ideas were good, but it wasn’t until I started studying story
composition and screenwriting that I discovered how much fun writing within
defined borders could be. This is why I have gravitated to writing comic books,
which, while having the unlimited budget of imagination also have some of the
most stringent physical constraints of any medium.

When it comes to structuring the story, I put the draft
through two filters: The Three Act Structure and The Hero’s Journey.

The Three Act
Structure is the tried and true Rosetta Stone of screen writing, and what
it does is give your plot cohesion, rising action, and a resolution.It looks like this:

1.Opening

2.Inciting Incident

3.Act 1 Turning Point

4.Mid-Point

5.Act 2 Turning Point

6.Crisis

7.Climax

8.Resolution

9.Final Page

I call Step 9 “Final Page” instead of “Denouement” because I
don’t want my story to have Lord of the
Rings Disease, where the story is really over but there’s another hour of
Hobbits crying that the audience has to sit through. When it’s done, it’s
done.

Once I know that the story has all these elements, I then
worry about character, which brings me to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey:

1.The Ordinary World

2.The Call to Adventure

3.Refusal of the Call

4.Meeting with the Mentor

5.Crossing the Threshold (end of Act 1)

6.Tests, Allies & Enemies

7.Approach

8.Ordeal (near mid-point)

9.The Reward

10.The
Road Back (3/4 of the way through)

11.Resurrection
(climax)

12.Return
with the Elixir

If you compare The Three Act Structure to The Hero’s Journey,
you’ll notice that they overlap, but The Hero’s Journey is much more concerned
with the Hero, hence the name. It’s
important to note that The Hero’s Journey does
not have to happen in the order stated above. “Meeting with the Mentor” could
easily happen during the “Test, Allies & Enemies” portion, at the beginning
of Act 2.

What is important is
that every part of these two structure templates serves the character and the
story you want to become your comic book masterpiece.

So now that you have a well structured tale and a compelling
hero to put through the ringer, how do you turn this into a comic book script?